It’s time to RIOT: Robots of Brixton

Factory Fifteen are a UK based film and animation studio, led by directors Jonathan Gales, Paul Nicholls and Kibwe Tavares. Their backgrounds range from architecture, 3d visualisation, engineering, animation and photography. They translate this to a multi-disciplinary and distinctive approach to film making.

Their creative shorts and artwork have been exhibited around the world in various film festivals such as Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, Frieze Art Fair, The Whitechapel Gallery, The Royal Academy, Africa International Film Festival and London Short Film Festival.

Director and fellow Wilsons School mandem Kibwe Tavares picked up the Jury prize for animation direction in the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for Robots of Brixton, which also won the RIBA Silver Medal.

Robots of Brixton has deliberate echoes of the Brixton riots in the early 80s. The film, a mixture of architectural drawings and futuristic animation depicting and ‘alternative’ Brixton which has degenerated into a disregarded area inhabited by London’s new robot workforce – robots built and designed to carry out all of the tasks which humans are no longer inclined to do. The mechanical population of Brixton has rocketed, resulting in unplanned, cheap and quick additions to the skyline.

“It’s an event that happened at the start of my childhood. This event helped give the black community a voice, and helped put me in the position as the young black academic that I was when I made it. I thought it was an important story to retell, but I used tools I’d been working with, like character animation and visualization, to retell it so that it wouldn’t be such a stereotypically black project and more accessible to wider audiences” – Kibwe Tavares

Earlier this year Kibwe Tavares graced the stage to give further insight into his motivations behind this short film. To see more check out his interview on TED by clicking HERE